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My Ubuntu Touch Experience


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A couple of days ago I decided that since I liked Ubuntu, I would give Ubuntu Touch a try on my Google/ASUS Nexus 7 tablet (2013 Wifi version).  After messing around with it for a few days I re-flashed back to Android and I thought I would share my thoughts on Ubuntu Touch with you guys.

 

The operating system itself looks and feels nice.  It seemed to boot even faster than Android, and was easy to use and navigate.  I think that as a platform it has the potential to do well, and it seemed really stable because for the entire two days, after installing multiple apps and running two different versions of the system, I experienced no crashes.  The applications written by Canonical for the platform seem to run smoothly, and there is even one or two commercially produced applications in the software center.  There's a centralized "accounts" section in the settings menu that lets you store your account usernames/passwords for Ubuntu SSO, Google, Facebook, etc., and native applications can leverage this so you don't have to sign into each application individually.  The theme reminds me a lot of the Ubuntu PC operating system.  At the end of the day, it has the potential to be a worthy contender in the mobile market.  The interface is already looking fairly polished, and the operating system itself, along with the apps written by Canonical for it look and work very well.

 

The biggest failing of Ubuntu Touch though is content.  There's lots of applications available, but 99% of them seem to be what it calls "webapps" which basically means that when you install the app, you are effectively just creating a shortcut to the mobile version of the website.  There are effectively zero "official" 3rd party applications (Netflix, Skype, Hulu, etc. are nowhere to be seen), the vast majority of them are created by volunteers and even then are just webapps that point to the mobile website instead of executing native code and taking advantage of the hardware or the operating system.  Not only that, but the browser does not seem to draw from the "accounts" widget in the system settings.  The Facebook application was installed by default and seems to draw from the "Accounts" settings, so you don't have to log in each time; however, there is some work to be done.  Here's an example.  Last night I was watching a YouTube video.  The YouTube scope that was installed by default however, only lets you browse YouTube videos.  When you actually try to watch a video, it launches the web browser and you watch the video in the browser.  OK, no big deal, until I tried sharing the video on Facebook.  At first, nothing happened, so I clicked it again several times, so I clicked the "View Open Tabs" button in the browser menu and noticed each attempt to share the video had opened a new tab in the browser on Facebook, but there was no kind of notification to let me know anything had happened.  However, the built-in web browser is separate from the Facebook application, and did not pull my Facebook credentials from the accounts setting, so I had to manually log into Facebook in the web browser in order to share the video.

 

The operating system itself does have a few quirks that need to be worked out as well.  Copy/paste is not properly implemented.  This became a huge issue trying to enter my 63 character wifi password.  You can copy/paste inside of some applications, but not between them, so when I placed a text document on my tablet with the wifi password and "copied" it, and then attempted to connect to the wifi, there was no way to paste the password into the system dialog.  I also noticed random hiccups with the sound backend that required a restart to fix.  There were times when I would open my music player and music wouldn't play, and I would notice games would become silent.  On one occasion I recorded a video and when I tried to play the video I got an error regarding the backend.  The sound issues seem to have been resolved when I upgraded it from the "devel" channel to the "devel-proposed" channel (the nexus 7 does not have an image in the "stable" channel yet), but the copy/paste issues still existed.

 

Overall I think the people over at Canonical have some work to do both in polishing up a rough edge here and there on the platform, and in attracting 3rd party app developers to port their software.  My biggest complaint was not the sound issues since upgrading to the devel-proposed channel seemed to fix those, and it wasn't the copy/paste problem, it was a serious lack of official, non-webapp content.  The default set of applications worked well, and I found a couple of fun games including Flappy Bird, Cut the Rope, and a tower defense game called "Machines vs Machines" that was incredibly difficult even on easy mode.  However, the vast majority of applications don't integrate with the "accounts" setting, don't provide push notifications properly (they didn't work for Facebook for me), and most of them are basically just a shortcut to the mobile website.  Even the official Facebook app that was installed by default was just its own little shortcut to the mobile Facebook site.

 

Has anybody else played around with Ubuntu Touch?  What were your thoughts?

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Something else I really missed was a gesture keyboard (swype).  I've gotten so used to it that having to hunt and peck the on-screen keyboard felt really non-intuitive.

 

Another positive was the fact that when you enable developer mode you can log into a remote terminal with your Ubuntu laptop and use the bash terminal on your device to troubleshoot or accomplish tasks.

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